听 A defiantly uncompromising European art-house movie, Process is actually written and directed by American filmmaker C S Leigh. The title refers to the stages through which an unnamed actress (a typically intense B茅atrice Dalle) passes before she decides to take her own life. Filmed in 29 single takes, and containing next to no dialogue, the film plays around with the chronological order of its gruelling story. Accompanied by John Cale's eerie score, it succeeds in baffling and discomforting, whilst remaining strangely watchable.
Process doesn't attempt to explain the motivations of its anonymous characters: instead we piece together fragments of information to get a sense of their haunted lives. Dalle's thespian is suffering from cancer and has had a mastectomy. And it appears that she was in a car crash, which killed her baby and which crippled her husband (Guillaume Depardieu, who, to add further resonance, has had a leg amputated in real life following a motorbike accident).
"SEEMS TO UNFOLD IN REAL TIME"
It is, however, the way Leigh fuses form and content, which gives this almost monochrome film its unsettling power. Collaborating with Catherine Breillat's regular cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis, the director photographs the lengthy scenes with an elegant detachment, avoiding close-ups. The result is that we as viewers feel the troubling weight of these situations that seem to be unfolding in real time. From Dalle's character eating crushed-up glass, tattooing a concentration camp number on her wrist, or suffocating herself with a black bag, it's clear that Process offers an exacting account of an individual's self-destruction. Yet there's also some darkly ironic humour here, evident in the film's closing song: The Jam's That's Entertainment.
In French with English subtitles.
